Pandora Shares Dancing at an All-Time High…

The latest evidence: Pandora just announced that they had 76.2 million active listeners in December 2013, 13 percent more than a year ago. These active listeners spent 1.58 billion hours listening to the service.

Pandora also says they have 8.6 percent of the entire U.S. radio market, up from 7.6 percent a year ago.

Pandora is also adding advertisements to their in-car platform, which is currently used by over 4 million people. Companies such as BP and Taco Bell have also recently purchased ad space; ads will be 15 or 30 seconds and there will be less ads in-car than on other platforms.

Let’s see how the whole ad-based in-car streaming thing works out. “Nearly half of all radio listening takes place in the car,” Pandora’s Chief Marketing Officer, Simon Fleming-Wood said. “We knew early on that to redefine radio, we would need to seamlessly deliver Pandora through in-dash entertainment systems.”

Investors were also optimistic about Pandora’s developments: on January 7th, Pandora’s shares hit an all-time high of $33.70. Things settled at $32.44 at the closing bell.

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A lot of people will stick to local radio with live DJs and newscasters… It’s a community thing.

That said, there are roughly 232mm radio listeners in the USA 12+. 8.6% marketshare is roughly 20mm American Pandora listeners. The rest are based worldwide bypassing Internet blocks. Read their press releases very carefully; they never say they have 76.2 mm American listeners… Misleading nonetheless because they don’t say worldwide either.

A lot of people will try Pandora as they wait for iTunes Radio to launch in their country.

I wonder if there is a Wall Street analyst smart enough to short the stock and then ask Pandora to clarify their press releases.

Hi Yves, I think you are confusing the numbers. Pandora had 76.2 million people listen to their service in December 2013, almost all of which were in the U.S. The total was 1.58 billion hours. Pandora’s market share is determined by dividing Pandora’s monthly listening hours by the total listening hours of all radio listening in the U.S. in that month as estimated by Arbitron and Triton’s Webcast Metrics. Pandora’s publicly released market share number is not their number of active users divided by all U.S. radio users. If that was the case, Pandora’s U.S. radio market share is more like 33%.

Double check your facts. What you’re saying is Pandora subscribers listen to roughly 30min per day while the rest of Americans listen to roughly 2.5 hours per day. Doesn’t make any sense.

If non-Internet radio is clearly the favourite there is no point in spending time with Pandora for more than half a second. It makes more sense that Pandora subscribers listen to 2.5 hours per day therefore the true number of USA subscribers is

1.58 billion American hours per month / 30 Days / 2.5 hours per day = roughly 21mm American Pandora subscribers.

You are doing the math correctly, you are just applying an erroneous formula. It would be like saying Yves posts ten comments per day on DMN. Yves is an average DMN user. DMN has 10,000 daily users, therefore DMN gets 100,000 daily user comments. It doesn’t. You can claim it, but it is a falsehood, like most of the things you write about Pandora.

Pandora has 70+million people that listen to their service each month. Almost all of those listeners are in the U.S., and a few are in Australia and N.Z. Almost none are from other countries (b/c Pandora blocks them), and of those that are listening from countries other than the US, AUS, and NZ, 100% are violating Pandora’s user agreement.

Yes, they call it positive cash flow, or in the case of Pandora, PAID SUBSCRIBERS. With the exception of a few high flyers that actually make money, like Apple, we may be looking at a serious “correction” on Wall Street in the tech sector, which once again is loaded with “potential” but in many cases little to show for it.

Music startups are seeing these huge valuations because they are a data goldmine. As Aaron Ray (The Collective) points out, Pandora is integrated into your mobile phone, car stereo, and Television. You’ve given the application permission to track where you go, what you listen to, and what you spend your time doing. Tumbler, Waze, Instagram, all sold from a mobile standpoint for over a billion dollars with zero profits. The value is in the reliability of the data they collect.